Down Res Problems

[Olof Ekbergh]

I find that my AJA HDe and Matrox MX02 both do a great job.

I usually edit in M100 or FCP and I always monitor in both HD and SD on multiple monitors, Pro LCD and CRT and also a consumer LCD. You can letterbox or crop or pan and scan and see the results in real time. This way you know exactly how finished footage will look on any monitor.

So I do all my editing / grading in HD and then lay off to Beta or whatever as a last step.

We still do a lot of commercials in SD 4:3. We have no problems what so ever mixing old DSR500, BetaSP or even stock footage with EX3 footage.

Some footage needs to be softened to look better SD, I do that and my grading in Color, while monitoring SD and HD.

If project is for SD DVD then I still do all my edit / grading in HD and then use Bitvice to downconvert to mpeg, I have always been very happy with the results.

I have read some people like 720 better for down converting, I have not found this to be the case.

Olof Ekbergh

[Michael Slowe]

I too edit my EX footage in HD with Media 100. I have down converted to SD both within Media 100 and BitVice and find very little difference in quality between the two. Possibly Media 100 slightly better because it’s done with hardware (HDx board) in the version I have. The new versions for the Intel chipped Mac G5’s can only do down conversion with software so probably slightly inferior to the BitVice down convert. I would have thought that the Matrox kit would do the best job. The very best I ever saw was with the HDCAM deck, but that costs £30,000 so you might expect that.

Michael Slowe

[Olof Ekbergh]

M100 v13.x with HDe AJA board does hardware down convert and it is very good.

I have 2 of the new MacPros (Intel) one is the brand new Nehalam 8 cores, one has the AJA board and the other MX02, they both do hardware down convert.

V14 or Suit version of M100 will support the MX02 witch also does up convert in hardware on the fly.

Bitvice down convert can never be as good as uncompressed hardware output. It is compressed to MPEG a very lossy but efficient codec. But it is about as good as MPEG for SD DVD compression gets.

Olof Ekbergh

[Ryan Jenkins]

thanks for you thoughts guys. It’s a funny one as it only seems to be with a few wider shots that have a fair bit of detail in the that i get the issue, but it looks horrible. I’ll keep pressing on and do some testing.
Thanks again for your input.

cheers
Ryan.

cheers
Ryan.